Competing with doorway pages
-
Hi all, it's my understanding that 'doorway pages' are bad practice. However, when googling for the services that our company offers, along the lines of '[service] [location]', businesses turn up in Google SERPs that outrank us purely with doorway pages.
Take this as an example:
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=seo+dorking
One of the results is this company who seem to rank for pretty much every town modifier:
https://prioritypixels.co.uk/seo-agency-dorking/
If you look at their sitemaps you'll see thousands of these pages:
https://prioritypixels.co.uk/page-sitemap16.xml
All the content is slightly different but broadly speaking it is very similar. It seems that, in the short term, we can't compete with this company but we could if we employed the same tactics.
So my question is: is what they are doing really risking a penalty?
-
Have I finally found a conundrum that the great Moz brain can't solve?
-
Any thoughts, Mozzers?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Pages automatically generated
Hello, I use the divi theme and got pages that were automatically generated with images. Is google going to penalise me because of those and consider it is thin content ? Should I remove those ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
If a page ranks in the wrong country and is redirected, does that problem pass to the new page?
Hi guys, I'm having a weird problem: A new multilingual site was launched about 2 months ago. It has correct hreflang tags and Geo targetting in GSC for every language version. We redirected some relevant pages (with good PA) from another website of our client's. It turned out that the pages were not ranking in the correct country markets (for example, the en-gb page ranking in the USA). The pages from our site seem to have the same problem. Do you think they inherited it due to the redirects? Is it possible that Google will sort things out over some time, given the fact that the new pages have correct hreflangs? Is there stuff we could do to help ranking in the correct country markets?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ParisChildress1 -
Competing URLs
Hi We have a number of blogs that compete with our homepage for some keywords/phrases. The URLs of the blogs contain the keywords/phrases. I would like to re-work the blogs so that they target different keywords that don't compete and are more relevant. Should I change the URLs as I think this is what is mainly causing the issue? If so, should I 301 old URL's to the homepage? For example, say we we're a site that specialised in selling plastic cups. Currently there is a blog with the URL www.mysite.com/plastic-cups that outranks the homepage for _plastic cups. _The blog isn't particularly relevant to plastic cups and the homepage should rank for this term. How should I let Google know that it is the homepage that is most relevant for this term? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Buffalo_71 -
Which of these examples are doorway pages?
Hi there, I am soon to launch a new platform/directory website, however, have a concern over doorway pages. I have read many articles on the difference between Doorway and Landing pages and do have a good understanding, however, am still very anxious that what I intend to do will be risking Google penalties. I have looked at other directory/platform websites and have noticed that a lot of them are still using doorway pages and are not getting penalised. So I was wondering if someone wouldn't mind kindly letting me know their opinion on which of the following examples are doorway pages and which are not so I can better understand what I can and cannot do? Example 1: When I Google 'piano lessons new york' and 'trumpet lessons new york' I get the following 'landing pages' in search: https://takelessons.com/new-york/piano-lessons https://takelessons.com/new-york/trumpet-lessons To me, the above pages are definitely doorway pages as they are very similar with content and text and are simply an intermediary step between the Google search and their listings pages for piano/trumpet teachers in New York. Is this correct? Example 2: When I Google 'piano lessons Sydney' I get presented with the following web page in search: http://www.musicteacher.com.au/directory/sydney-nsw/lessons/piano/ I would think that this is NOT a doorway page as the user has been taken directly to the search results page in the directory and the page doesn't seem to have been set up for the sole purpose of listing in search results for 'Piano Lessons in Sydney'. Example 3: When I Google 'pet minding Sydney' I get presented with the following two pages in search: https://www.madpaws.com.au/petsitters/Sydney-New-South-Wales?type=night&service=1&from=0&to=99&city=Sydney&state=New-South-Wales https://www.pawshake.com.au/petsitters/Sydney%252C%2520New%2520South%2520Wales%252C%2520Australia Like Example 2, I don't think these pages would be classified as doorway pages as they too direct to the search results page in the site directory instead of an intermediary page. What do you think? Thanks so much in advance for your expertise and help! Kind Regards, Adrian
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Amor20050 -
NoIndex Purchase Page
We ran a ScreamingFrog report of one of our websites and found that there are thousands of instances of a single page with a different URL parameter, for example: purchase.cfm?id=1234
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ErnieB
purchase.cfm?id=1235
purchase.cfm?id=1236
purchase.cfm?id=1237 and we do not need purchase.cfm to be indexed for any reason as there is practically no content on that page to begin with, but it's just part of the purchase steps in our website. What is the best way to deal with this for Google & SEO? Should we do a Meta NoIndex of this purchase.cfm page? Thank you.0 -
Blocking Pages Via Robots, Can Images On Those Pages Be Included In Image Search
Hi! I have pages within my forum where visitors can upload photos. When they upload photos they provide a simple statement about the photo but no real information about the image,definitely not enough for the page to be deemed worthy of being indexed. The industry however is one that really leans on images and having the images in Google Image search is important to us. The url structure is like such: domain.com/community/photos/~username~/picture111111.aspx I wish to block the whole folder from Googlebot to prevent these low quality pages from being added to Google's main SERP results. This would be something like this: User-agent: googlebot Disallow: /community/photos/ Can I disallow Googlebot specifically rather than just using User-agent: * which would then allow googlebot-image to pick up the photos? I plan on configuring a way to add meaningful alt attributes and image names to assist in visibility, but the actual act of blocking the pages and getting the images picked up... Is this possible? Thanks! Leona
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HD_Leona0 -
Is there an optimal ratio of external links to a page vs internal links originating at that page ?
I understand that multiple links fro a site dilute link juice. I also understand that external links to a specific page with relevant anchortext helps ranking. I wonder if there is an ideal ratioof tgese two items
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Apluswhs0 -
Does a page on a site with high domain authority build page authority easier? i.e. less inbound links?
Is this also why people build backlinks to their BBB profiles, Yellowpages Profiles, etc. i.e. why do people build backlinks to other pages that link to them? Wouldn't it be more beneficial to just build that backlink directly to your target?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | adriandg0